Sundanese
Franz Müller-Gotama
California State University, Fullerton
Sundanese (Austronesian, Western Malayo-Polynesian) is the indigenous language of West Java, Indonesia. With approximately 25 million speakers, it is the second largest regional language in Indonesia after Javanese. The Priangan dialect of the area around the provincial capital of Bandung is considered standard and is taught in elementary school in West Java as well as forming the medium, of a lively, if limited, publishing business. The book presents a theory-neutral description of the essential structure of standard Sundanese, emphasizing its typologically most interesting features.
Like its neighbor Javanese, Sundanese has distinct speech levels, which require a speaker to select from a different set of vocabulary items depending on the relative status of the interlocutors. Sundanese developed these speech levels relatively recently as a result of the Javanese hegemony over West Java during the Mataram period, and the system is consequently less elaborately developed than in Javanese. Sundanese morphology is rather more complex that than of Indonesian. The chapter on morphology will concentrate on the elaborate system of forming plurals from nouns, verbs, and adjectives and on reduplication. The chapter on syntax will deal with such issues as basic word order and phrase structure, diathesis, negation, the use of the topic and focus markers, and coordination and subordination.
ISBN 9783895869266. Languages of the World/Materials 369. 80pp. 2001.
